Laptop Recovered By Power Of Internet

It’s always good (and funny) when justice is done in the full glare of the media and one victim has gone to great lengths to publicise a thief.

On 21 March last, Joshua Kaufman had his MacBook stolen from
his apartment in Oakland, California. For most of us, the only option would be
turning to the police to try and track down the thief. Not so for Kaufman
however, as he had the foresight to install Hidden, an app developed by a
company based in Watford. The app for Macs allows you to track your laptop
where ever it is in the world and it will take screen shots of what the thief
is doing with the laptop as well as taking pictures with the webcam and send
all this info back to the rightful owner. The app costs from $15-a-year which
includes help from the Hidden team in dealing with the police to try and get
your computer back.

Kaufman was initially getting no where with the police so he
decided to turn to the internet and posted the pictures of the person who had
stolen his computer using the MacBook on his This Guy Has My MacBook blog. The pictures show
someone sleeping on a couch in front of the laptop, using it while in bed (above) and
even while driving. Once the pictures were posted, Good Morning America got hold of the story and contacted the Oakland PD to see why it was doingnothing about the theft, despite having
pictures of the thief and his location. This, for some reason, sparked
the police into action and yesterday they finally apprehended the thief.

The happy ending to this story just goes to show the power
of the internet. However many commenters on the Hidden blog were
questioning whether or not this was a viral ad campaign to garner some coverage
for the blog but the company has categorically denied it. If it is an ad campaign, then its a pretty good one and if it a real case of theft, then it is better than any episode of CSI we've seen - then again that's not saying much.